ElectricFlow® v7.2 FR is now available

2017-03-17 00:10:09 UTC

Summary

Electric Cloud is pleased to announce the general availability of the ElectricFlow 7.2 FR. This release is of the “Feature Release” type. For more information about types of releases, please go to ElectricFlow Release Strategy.

ElectricFlow 7.2 FR continues to expand the support for deployment of microservices based applications, brings enhanced control and flexibility to pipeline and release modeling, as well as enhancements to the solution across the board.

Some of the highlights are:

Deployment of Individual Microservices

In 7.1, we introduced native support for modeling and deploying microservices and containers at scale. In 7.2, we continue to strengthen this solution by adding partial deployments of microservices, This feature supports the best practices for microservices architectures to have the ability to deploy, undeploy and scale a service independently of other microservices.

Parallel Tasks in Pipelines to Improve Efficiency

In continuing to enable faster software delivery, ElectricFlow pipelines now support parallel tasks. This includes parallelism for tasks in pipeline stages, gate approvals, and deployers. Providing the flexibility to interleave parallel and serial tasks means deployment activities are more efficient while maintaining any required dependencies.

Added Flexibility with Multiple Deployers in a Release Pipeline Stage

Release pipeline stages can now contain multiple deployer objects, adding more flexibility for safe releases. Multiple deployers allow for actions to be taken between application deployments, and grouping of applications based on dependencies and the ability to parallelize the deployments.

Automated Gate Rules for More Control and Automation

To achieve full automation in pipelines, we have added the support for automated rules for entry and exit gates on pipeline stages. Gates can now be automated based on custom conditions or the outcome of an ElectricFlow procedure. This allows for basing promotion on outcomes of deployments or tests, or on external tools.

Performance Improvement for High Scale Concurrent Workloads

7.2 introduces parallelization of the job step scheduler. This architectural change will increase the scalability and throughput of the ElectricFlow platform, improving performance for large numbers of parallel jobs – such as concurrent deployments.

AIX Platform Support for the ElectricFlow Agent

Natively manage, automate and orchestrate AIX machines using ElectricFlow. The new ElectricFlow AIX agent supports the use of all ElectricFlow plugins and application release capabilities.

New Plugins and Plugin Versions

New plugins EC-OpenShift, EC-Azure and EC-Kubernetes continue to expand the container provider integrations for ElectricFlow Microservices applications. They enable seamless deployments of microservices and containers to these container platforms, and allow easy portability between container providers.

The EC-Dynatrace plugin gives ElectricFlow users the ability to uncover end user, performance and operational cost impacting issues in cloud and enterprise much earlier in the delivery pipeline. This bi-directional integration enables a closed feedback loop between DevOps and Release pipelines and Dynatrace’s AppMon & UEM.

The new Plugin Wizard makes authoring plugins in ElectricFlow quick and easy. Users can leverage the Plugin Wizard to iterate quickly while developing new plugins

Updates and improvements to the EC-WebLogic and EC-JBoss plugins.

Various Product Enhancements

Artifact Upload from UI – Easily upload new artifact versions directly from the UI, making development and testing of new flows easier.

Easily generate DSL for ElectricFlow procedures and workflows through the UI.

See the “System Requirements and Supported Platforms” section in the ElectricFlow Installation Guide for a complete list of supported platforms and configurations.

Upgrade

Upgrades to ElectricFlow 7.1 FR are supported from ElectricCommander 4.2.x, ElectricFlow 5.x, ElectricFlow 6.0 through 6.5, 6.0.1 through 6.0.7, and ElectricFlow 7.0,7.0.1. Systems that are pre-4.2 must be upgraded to ElectricCommander 4.2.x before upgrading to ElectricFlow 7.2 FR. For complete upgrade requirements and instructions, please see the ElectricFlow Installation Guide.